🇯🇵 Kenta Yamashita

Kenta Yamashita is an elite professional racing driver rated 6,403, competing primarily in Super GT, where he races for TGR Team au Tom's in the GT500 class, piloting purpose-built Toyota prototypes in shared-car endurance racing. He holds FIA Platinum grading, the highest professional classification in sportscar and endurance competition. His career spans 13 seasons from 2014 to the present, with 162 starts across four series.[1]

Yamashita has won 15 races across his career, including 14 in Super GT and one in Super Formula. In Super GT, his primary series, he has accumulated 25 podiums from 79 starts and was a member of TGR Team au Tom's when the team won the GT500 championship in 2024. He won the All-Japan Formula 3 Championship in 2016 and has contested Super Formula since 2019, where he has scored one win and ten podiums from 69 starts. His sole appearance in international endurance racing came in the World Endurance Championship's LMP2 class in 2019 and 2020, with seven starts for High Class Racing. Early in his career he raced the single-class Formula 3 Macau championship, competing against graded professionals in that mixed amateur and professional field.[2]

In the fields Yamashita regularly contests, he is closely matched with established professionals Tomoki Nojiri, a two-time Super Formula champion, and Tadasuke Makino, an elite professional and two-time GT500 champion. His most significant scalp comes in endurance racing, where he has twice finished ahead of generational driver George Russell and once ahead of Lando Norris, both of whom have gone on to compete in Formula 1 at the highest level. This speaks to the quality of professional machinery Yamashita has driven in multiclass endurance grids, though his primary standing has been built through sustained success in national Japanese racing against a full spectrum of professional and semi-professional competitors.